Overall Rating
  Awesome: 42.86%
Worth A Look: 19.05%
Just Average: 13.33%
Pretty Crappy: 3.81%
Sucks: 20.95%
8 reviews, 57 user ratings
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| Dogville |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Von Trier strikes again; a triumph for him and Kidman."
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Artists ranging from Nina Simone to Marianne Faithfull have covered the 'Threepenny Opera' song "Pirate Jenny," and Lars von Trier is the latest. 'Dogville,' which sparked controversy and debate ever since premiering at Cannes, takes the Brecht/Weill ditty as its inspiration, wedding it to the homespun theatrics of Thornton Wilder.Dogville is, at first, ostentatiously stagey: The entire film unfolds on a vast soundstage, with chalk marks denoting the outlines of the streets and delapidated homes of the town, not to mention benches and gooseberry bushes and even the town dog Moses. Yet this minimalist, digital-video-shot film has its own cinematic flash and thunder, and does things only movies can do.
Told in "nine chapters and a prologue," Dogville introduces us to the inhabitants of a near-death mountain town (during the Depression, one assumes), and a more motley crew would be hard to imagine. The youthful, philosophical, and rather pompous Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) is the town's nagging conscience, exhorting them to be "open" to new ideas. But most of them, including the weary laborer Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård, in one of his finest performances) and Tom's own father (Philip Baker Hall), a hypochondriacal doctor, don't care to hear it. The townspeople -- numbering fifteen in all -- attend Tom's "meetings" mostly to humor him, but probably also because, well, what else have they got to do?
Into this close-knit town comes Grace (Nicole Kidman), pursued by shadowy men with guns. Tom finds her first, and offers to take her in. She gratefully accepts, and the town agrees to give her two weeks in Dogville, so that they can get to know her. Grace spends this time offering her services doing things that don't necessarily need doing (there's so little work in Dogville that the townspeople pretty much have it covered). In time, Grace is accepted. She seems ready to start her life over in this placid, unchanging locale. But the story doesn't end there.
Von Trier has said that he intended Dogville as the first film in a trilogy. But it could also function as the final film in an unofficial trilogy that began with his Breaking the Waves (1996) and continued with Dancer in the Dark (2000). All three focus on women put to gruelling tests by larger forces -- fate, society, religion. Nicole Kidman, who has run hot and cold with me, weighs in here with a performance of willing subserviance -- to the material and to the director -- that rivals the work of Emily Watson and Björk in von Trier's earlier dramas. Everyone in the large ensemble seems to jump at the opportunity to work with such meaty yet primal material, from youngsters like Jeremy Davies (as a shy doofus) and Chloë Sevigny (as his acerbic sister) to veterans Lauren Bacall (as the stubborn tender of the gooseberry bushes) and Ben Gazzara (as a blind man too proud to admit his disability). Presiding over everything is the God's-eye narration, spoken by John Hurt in nostalgic, dulcet tones.
The town brings Grace to her knees over the span of three hours of screen time, yet Dogville, for all its "stage"-set whimsy and its imaginary trees and houses, never lags. The downward spiral is transfixing, the apocalyptic finale shocking. At heart, Dogville is a cinematic novel about hypocrisy, an attack on those who espouse "American values" without practicing them. The film is not called Grace; the town rejects grace (the quality and the person) and the possibility of redemption through hard work. Grace is running from a past worth running from, and Dogville's resident moralists prove themselves only too eager to throw her back to the wolves. In doing so, they become no better than the wolves, and we are left to judge them worthy of their fate."Pirate Jenny" is a fantasy, a song of empowerment sung by a maid, and it's possible to read the climax of 'Dogville' that way, too. But I doubt that's the interpretation von Trier had in mind.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8122&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/08/07 22:42:48
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2004 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Minneapolis/St.Paul Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Minneapolis/St.Paul Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
26-Mar-2004 (R)
DVD: 24-Aug-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2003
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